On Thursday 23 December 2004 02:56, Shel Belinkoff wrote: > I was talking with a friend earlier and the conversation got around to > modern cameras as he's thinking about getting a digi for his daughter. > There wasn't much i could help him with since I know so little about modern > cameras, and apart from shooting a few frames with John's istD and a lesser > number of frames with Juan's istD, and one frame with a Minolta a couple of > years ago, I've never used or even handled a modern autofocus camera. > That's probably quite unusual for this list. That got me to wondering how > many people here have never used a fully manual camera - no autofocus, no > modes, no built-in meter. Anyone? > > Shel
Being very young, I should by rights fall into this category, but I don't. I could never afford a modern autofocus camera until recently! My first serious camera was a Ricoh KR5 Super II, which I recieved on Christmas when I was 16. That camera gave up the ghost a few years later: the lensmount came apart (only by a bit) from the body, and the pentamirror housing cracked. That's what you get after years of hard use, being thrown in to bookbags, taken on vacations, to parties, etc. My next camera was a Pentax MX, which I got in "bargain" condition at KEH. A gem of a camera; I love it. The rewind knob snapped off in the middle of a hurried rewind as I was trying to get pictures of an antiwar demo in London in February of '02. It was repaired, probably with the rewind knob from a K1000, so it's not pretty, but it works really well. Took a licking & keeps on ticking. I acquired a ZX-M from someone at work at a ridiculously low price (I bought it mainly because he threw in a Vivitar 283 in with the bargain, and it amounted to getting a ZX-M body, a Ricoh 28-80 zoom, and Ricoh 50/1.7 free with the flash unit). Having a winder was weird. I designated this my back up 35mm film body. Then I got my *istDS. It might say something about me that I really haven't used the autofocus on it much, mounting my old Rikenon 50/1.4 XR on it almost all the time. Does anyone want to give me a 35/2 FAL and a 135/2.8 F? In between, I've dabbled in 6x6: a Lubitel (now converted to a pinhole camera), an ancient Rolleiflex (probably one of the last TLRs made by the Nazis, from what I can tell), a Minolta Autocord. -Luigi
